Coca-Cola to Kink-y for BBC

If you’ve listened to rock radio anytime in the past 40 years, you probably know this story line:

“I met her in a club down in old Soho

Where you drink champagne and it tastes just like Coca-Cola”

The Kinks recorded these lyrics about an encounter with a transvestite in April or May 1970. After it was released as a single June 12, 1970, Lola became one of the more controversial songs in modern rock, said Dave Davies, whose brother Ray is credited with writing the song. “We just thought it was little bit tongue-in-cheek humor that we might slip by the radio censorship, which it did. We always tried to get things past the censors and a lot of people didn’t realize what the song was about,” he told an interviewer in 1999.

But Lola didn’t slip by the BBC and Ray Davies had to fly to New York make a change in the master tape. The BBC didn’t have a problem with a song about a drag queen, but it did have a problem with “Coca-Cola.” The BBC, which had a monopoly on radio in the U.K. at the time, had a strict ban on advertising in music and objected to the use of the word. Ray Davies flew across the Atlantic Ocean on June 3 to replace the word “Coca” with the word “cherry” for the single.

If you listen to the album Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, Part One, Ray sings about Coca-Cola. Although the lyrics in the gatefold sleeve of the original LP use the “cherry-cola” line, the album actually contains the original “Coca-Cola” version. Almost every version you can find on the Internet uses “cherry.” Even in later concert videos, Ray sings about “cherry cola.”

Lola was a big hit for the Kinks, reaching No. 2 on the U.K. singles charts and climbing to No. 9 on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 charts. It was No. 1 in Ireland, the Netherlands and New Zealand. Lola Versus the Powerman, which was released in late November 1970, didn’t do quite so well — peaked at No. 35 in the U.S. Because British charts were limited to the top 10 or top 15 albums, Lola Versus the Powerman never charted in the U.K.